/var/lock
/var/run
have been moved to /run which is in tmpfs anyway. There are still packages that use the old locations but they will continue to work.

Do you reaklly want to put /var/log in tmpfs - you will loose all you logs unless you preserve this folder across reboots.
/var/spool is home for your mail, which has not yet been delivered to your users and in flight print jobs._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Background: Several PCs shall run via nfsroot - and use the same root folder... (I only need to emerge one directory to make a software update...)

My and a few other people want to move software to /usr to simplify that. Sadly, that's a long way to go, and many people-obstacles on it.

Quote:

However, some directories like

/tmp
/var/empty
/var/log
/var/lock
/var/run
/var/spool

are used and changed during runtime.

Q1: Can I mount them as tmpfs in fstab (The nodes have enough ram)?? Is that a problem? Are there any files written to these folders BEFORE mounting the directories from fstab?

/tmp, /var/lock/, /var/run can be tmpfs already.

For the other locations, you will probably need to create additional subdirectories on boot (and chown/chmod them correctly!), e.g. using tmpfiles.d). Otherwise, the tools may have trouble accessing it.

Quote:

Q2: How about a separate /etc for each machine. Any chance that I can mount the /etc as kernel command line?

Don't think so. You'd rather have to NFS-mount /bin, /lib and so on, preferably in initramfs...